02 January 2015

The McNamara Line in the East China Sea

I first got into some correspondence with my friend Dave Foster of China Lake on whether land-based missile networks could be reliably effective in "enabling blockades of critical waterways”? As he put it, maybe. Remote sensing looks nice and crisp on paper, but any number of practical limitations on sensor networks in various weather conditions and sea-states make discriminating red from blue amidst the shipping and the clutter rather problematic. Mainly, Dave is thinking about the ill-fated Igloo White and the Secure Border Initiative sensor network projects. The former was a more earnest effort than the latter, but each was much easier to conceptualize than to develop technically, particularly amidst the countermeasures of those trying to avoid their gaze.

In the end, neither got much done, but once things like these get underway, the funding can be difficult to turn off, whatever the technical indications. As John Cochrane of the University of Chicago wrote in a recent Wall Street Journaleditorial, grands projets have a tendency to turn into “crony boondoggles”. That said, we should not discount the psychological effect of declaring a looming capability, rather as “Star Wars” scared the Soviets in the 1980s. With a strong enough impression of American and Japanese surveillance and firepower in the Ryukus, a Chinese Scharnhorst or Gneisenau might not even try a run down the coast.

The sensor net is a hazy concept at this point. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of anti-ship missile programs on offer for the Navy today:

Lockheed Martin’s Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), funded by DARPA, and in the early phases of work.

Boeing’s more modestly-ranging Harpoon II+, under development with internal money at Boeing.

The LRASM and the JSOW couldn’t arm any American coastal artillery—the former for the range limitations of the INF Treaty, and the second because it’s an unpowered glide bomb. A contact at the Boeing Company wanted to stress that the current development of the Harpoon is actually the II+, which adds a datalink to the Block II, and thus aims to be almost as slick as the putative Block III, cancelled some years ago in favor of the AGM-154C1. Boeing is working to buy back in, which puts four companies with four programs in the running to fill the Navy’s needs for air- and surface-launched anti-ship missiles.

Generally, the missile issue seems under control. It’s the surveillance solution that’s less mature. Scaring the Chinese Navy back into port would take a concerted effort at building a maritime traffic net, and fairly, not just another McNamara Line in the East China Sea.

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What I Do

James Hasik is a senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council. Since September 2001, he has been studying global security challenges and the economic enterprises that provide the tools to address them.

In the Press

On Section 232 silliness

And as Trudeau repeats whenever interviewed on American television, Canadian aluminum still ends up in U.S. fighter aircraft and its steel is used in American tanks. James Hasik, senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council, said that nobody he knows in the national security community believes that invocation of the Section 232 national security clause has any substance. “I can’t imagine the circumstances in which a Canadian federal government would try to choke off aluminum supplies to the U.S.,” Hasik said. Trump to See National Security Threat in Canada Firsthand, in the Washington Post, 7 June 2018.

On what to watch

James Hasik, a professor at the National Defense University, said he would be keeping a close eye on how the autonomous Sea Hunter vehicle does during ongoing testing. DARPA recently transferred the Sea Hunter, designed to travel thousands of miles over open seas, for months at a time, without a crew member on board, over to the Navy for continued testing. “The economics of that concept are so compelling,” Hasik said. If the concept proves out, it could have “some profound applications for fleet structure, some profound applications for warfighting.” What to expect from AI, space and other tech over the next 18 months, in Defense News, 10 May 2018.

On market entry, in the long run

Oshkosh “might wind up with a run of many decades as having been the favorite for military trucks in North America. But it doesn’t mean that they are guaranteed to keep it, because it’s an industry in which entry into the military market segment is not as challenging as it is in other segments”.
Army Moves Forward with New Medium Truck Acquisition in National Defense, April 2018

More on the brilliance of the feasible

“The Army’s failure to effect greater progress [in armored vehicle programs] may have seemed tragic, but retrospectively, it was almost fated: programs like FCS and GCV were doomed before they were begun. For had the future been more readily foreseen from within the department, technological trajectories like those would have called long ago for more modest investments. The Army’s leadership is just recognizing the art of the possible, and investing accordingly.”
Army Accelerates Armor: Stryker, Trophy, MPF Race To Field in Breaking Defense, 16 October 2017

On the brilliance of the feasible

“There’s actually no reason to dislike the program today. I haven’t noticed yet any meaningful cost overruns on JLTV. I think with fixed-price contracts — as they have — you’re not going to get them. From what I can tell it is a great deal. It does basically exactly what it’s supposed to do, and at a pretty reasonable price.”
JLTV Program Could Serve as Acquisition Model, in National Defense magazine, 9 October 2017

On staying out of the way

“In 2014, Russian signals intelligence drones and Russian artillery worked quickly and efficiently to target Ukrainian troops by triangulating their radio emissions. And as the Ukrainians learned, emitting in any pattern that says headquarters will attract lots of cannon and rocket fire.”
Army seeks fixes to vulnerable satellite communications,
in Space News, 28 September 2017